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Community Guidelines Update

Kickstarter creators are encouraged to share their projects with their friends, fans, and followers, however invading inboxes with unwanted messages is not allowed. Spam is more than just a nuisance — it makes every other project look bad by association.

We've always been aggressive in policing spam both on-site and off. Spamming can result in someone's account and project being suspended. Today's guidelines update clarifies exactly what we mean when we say don't spam. Spam is:

Emailing or direct messaging strangers about your project.

Sending unsolicited @-replies on Twitter.

Using email lists from third parties or soliciting backers of other Kickstarter projects.

Link-bombing forums.

Promoting a project on other projects' pages.

At the core of these guidelines is a simple principle: be respectful and conscientious about how and where you share your project. We know getting the word out about projects can be a big effort, and we hope these guidelines are helpful to everyone in our community. Thanks!

Comments

I'm glad to see this update. However, when our project was running, other project creators spammed us, (messages to our KS page/inbox), I reported this, and the offenders were allowed to stay on KS. I hope this will not be the case going forward. Thanks.

Sounds good both in spirit and wording until I got to this --- > "Promoting a project on other projects' pages"

Does this apply to a campaign owner on their own page?

Exmaples:
A couple times I have seen in an update a band point to their friends, who their fans probably are interested in.
I know of a couple video games, who did link to other video game campaigns at one point in the process.

This acctually is a relationship building thing, and not spam when it comes from the owner of the page.

I have a question on "Promoting a project on other projects' pages." What if its your own project and is a continuation? For example, you did a comic book kickstarter project. Now you're doing the second series or similar project and promoting it on your first kickstarter project which is completed. Does that fall under the spamming category cos I won't think so.

Pitching a member of the press is perfectly fine. Creators promoting other projects on their own project pages is also fine. That rule is about people posting comments on other people's projects saying "check out my project" etc. We'll adjust the language to make that more clear.

So what can be done about the folks who are trolling Kickstarter to create these email lists & then selling them to other people? I'm now getting tons of email from people who are using these 3rd party email lists to promote their campaigns. What do you do about them when they are sending unsolicited emails off-list?

I've enticed my backers to send a tweet to some well known game bloggers using a hashtag. Is this ok? I don't want to link my project to be rude. Just find it under my profile and let me know if this is "ok".

This is great to see this in writing. I've been pretty annoyed by people blind emailing me to say, 'Hey, looks like you backed X and that's a lot like the Y that we're doing, please check us out." I always just promptly ignored them for doing that, even if the project sounded interesting, just on principle. Now, we have policy to stand on. Thanks!

Can you send a reply email to a project you supported stating that you have an active project? I would assume this would be rational, but I guess the grey area is the particular appropriateness of your text.

SPAM is bad. But what do you do when you've received a cryptic spam warning? I don't understand the source of the complaint? Whose email do I remove? I don't use lists, the 100 or so emails sent out are my contacts. Did someone on Twitter not like me? I only @replied to people I thought would sincerely be interested and relevant. Maybe 6 people I @replied. I have not been spamming. And your warning tells me NOTHING. Instead of getting the word out, I am spending this time trying to find source of my warning. Please, if your not going to tell me the source, then what's the point?